Many customers form their initial impression of service and product providers through their telephone interactions with Customer Service Representatives (CSRs). Indeed, for service providers in particular, CSRs are called when a new customer wants services, or when an existing customer has a problem or wants information or a change of service. As a result, CSRs function as "ambassadors" to the service provider's customers and their performance can have a direct impact on customer satisfaction as well as market share.
The CSR's job is a complicated one in which they are expected to handle all manner of customer calls regarding the provider's products and services. This means that they must simultaneously carry on a consultative conversation with the caller, manipulate service order and billing software to find out information about the caller, enter information regarding service registration, rapidly look-up information about availability, compatibility and capabilities of the different products and services from reference documentation, understand all of the features and incompatibilities of the offered services, and at times prepare mailings of information for the customer. These services and products, as well as the information about them, are frequently updated, producing an ongoing learning problem in order to "stay current". Because of this complexity, it may take a year or more of training and on-the-job experience for CSRs to become fully proficient.
At present, CSR training is directed predominantly to traditional learning activities such as lectures and discussions rather than actual job practice and training. In fact, trainees spend only about 1/4 of their class time practicing their job using exercises such as role plays and taking actual customer calls. However, both these techniques are less than optimal. Since instructors can only observe and coach on role play at a time, role plays are often done with little instructor interaction. Moreover, role plays are often done without access to a phone and computer terminal, the two essential components of the CSR's work environment. The result is that role playing lacks realism, minimizing the ability to prepare the trainee for the job that is to come.
Moreover, time spent by CSRs taking actual customer calls is structured so that trainees take only one specific type of call during a session, such as billing inquiries. As a result, while CSR trainees may receive dozens of calls in an average work session, they will actually handle only a limited number of those calls since calls other than a billing inquiry will be transferred to a regular CSR.
Computer-assisted learning systems have been developed to address some of the problems associated with traditional learning activities such as lectures and discussions. A typical computer-assisted learning system is illustrated in Haga et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,211,563 ("the Haga '563 patent"). The system of the Haga '563 patent allows a trainee to access teaching materials in computer storage through a central processor via input and display devices. While such a system may free instructors to concentrate on activities other than lecturing, it merely supports student training and is unable to tutor or interact with the student as would a traditional instructor.
As a result, computer-based training programs have also been developed that deliver instructions to a student trainee. Computer-based training programs, however, deliver such instructions staticly and uniformly. Thus, while again freeing instructors from lecturing, computer-based training programs still lack the dynamics associated with traditional instructors.
Therefore, a need exists for an intelligent tutoring system having dynamically organized instructional programs that employ independent representations of domain, instructional, and student knowledge enabling it to provide individualized instruction much like that provided by a personal human tutor. Such an intelligent tutoring system would provide real time, context-appropriate and cost-effective training enabling learners to perform appropriate domain tasks in the right manner and at the proper time. In so doing, such an intelligent tutoring system would decrease the time required to migrate learners from novice to expert, while increasing the number of trained personnel successfully reaching a more knowledgeable level.
An intelligent tutoring system would achieve these goals by dynamically creating and revising individual instruction plans, actively teaching difficult and abstract concepts and skills, guiding and assisting students during exploratory learning in a simulated environment, and tailoring training scenarios to the student's learning progress. More specifically, such a system would apply state-of-the-art knowledge regarding artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and multimedia to intelligently coach trainees to perform the job of the CSR.
In such a system, trainees would exercise their customer interaction skills by working through typical customer interactions in a tutoring environment that simulates their actual working environment. Trainees would study multimedia information, such as animations and video segments, prerequisite to specific types of customer interaction skills. Instruction would be trainee initiated but would also assess trainee performance and use such assessments to make recommendations about what to study or practice next, determine how to apply different instructional methods, initiate. interventions during procedural training sessions, and provide the trainee with performance feedback. Finally, such a system would also allow instructional designers to adjust instructional and student modeling parameters to further individualize the delivered instruction.